THE company which housed asylum seekers in a Glasgow hotel where a man was shot dead by police after stabbing six people failed to fund mental health care for survivors in the wake of the attack, MSPs were told.
Baroness Helena Kennedy KC said if accommodation provider Mears “had any good sense”, it would have funded “therapeutic help” following the incident, which she said left floors “awash with blood”.
Baroness Kennedy led an independent commission of inquiry into asylum provision in Scotland following the shooting of Badreddin Abdalla Adam at the Park Inn hotel in Glasgow in June 2020.
He had sought help 72 times for his deteriorating mental health before carrying out the stabbing attack, which left three asylum seekers, one police officer, and two staff members injured.
Baroness Kennedy said Mears had failed to provide mental health help for those who were “still suffering the consequences” of the attack.
Giving evidence to MSPs on Holyrood’s Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, the human rights lawyer also condemned the practice of “outsourcing” the care of people in “crisis” to private companies.
Speaking about Mears, the company which housed asylum seekers in the Park Inn, she said she had hoped it would have provided help “given what had happened”.
Baroness Kennedy said: “Many of the people who survived those incidents were still suffering the consequences of them.
“The floors were awash with blood in that hotel where that crisis took place and we thought that if Mears had any good sense and also wanted to maintain this contract, they should have immediately been funding the therapeutic help that should be offered to these people, and none of that was forthcoming.”
She went on to tell MSPs that she felt “the outsourcing to Mears had serious shortcomings” – saying she would prefer not-for-profit organisations to be given such contracts.
“I do not feel that profit making in this area is a good thing,” Baroness Kennedy said.
“There are some areas of our life where outsourcing to profit-making companies is just not an appropriate or ethical thing to do when you are dealing with humanity in crisis.
“There is something absolutely repugnant in that when you are dealing with those in crisis, those who have got serious problems. I have a very strong position on it.”
Her comments came as she complained that the use of hotels to house asylum seekers had “become normalised”, saying hoteliers had found such contracts to be a “reliable way of making money”.
Adding that the facilities provided are more like “hostel accommodation”, Baroness Kennedy linked the situation to the shortage of housing in the UK.
She said: “The provision of housing has become a crisis in our country.
“The investment in housing should be a priority for the nation, not just in relation to what you do for people who are asylum seeking, it is a problem for our young, it is a problem for people with young families, it is a problem for what you do with people when they become aged.
“We haven’t got housing sorted up and down the country, in England and Wales as well as in Scotland.
“I don’t pretend this is an easy one for governments. There is a shortage of accommodation because successive governments have failed to build new adequate housing.”
